Window Sitters

Evan had been thinking, when it began. When it ended, he was not. He had made up his mind. At the beginning, he just didn’t know. He was sitting in the subway station, sitting in his usual spot on a rudely graffiti’d bench, with his usual milk steamer, with his usual expression on his face, which was usually one of polite interest mingling with mild boredom. He had been writing, as per usual, in his dark green satin-covered notebook, that had been passed down to him by his grandfather, and thus there was a large coffee stain on the inside cover, which almost looked like a rabbit if you turned your head correctly and the light was just right. He had been writing, as per usual, in his dark green satin-covered notebook, about his… no, not friends, for he had no proper friends, not colleagues, for his true work was done alone, no, acquaintances wasn’t the right word… Subjects. Yes, he wrote about his subjects. It wasn’t as if he thought himself better than them, oh no, he rarely thought of himself at all, but simply because there was no other word to describe his relation to them. He had been writing their lives. Not about their lives. Just their lives. Someone, once, a very long time ago and a million years away, had asked Evan why he wrote their lives, not about their lives, just their lives. And he had, with a very pained expression, told them. No one asked Evan that much anymore. Pretty much the only questions he received each day were similar, if not identical; “Isn’t it a simply lovely day?” from the radio that didn’t really serve a purpose aside from filling space and time, as Evan was usually up long before the alarm. “The usual?” from Lena, the lady behind the counter at The Soy Bean, the café at which he frequented in his simple life. Evan doubted that she really noticed him. He supposed that somewhere in her subconscious mind she had unknowingly come to the realization that the man with the green notebook appeared regularly, at precisely 7:02 every morning, and that her hands subconsciously remembered the familiar hand movements that formed his usual frosted mint steamer. Evan had once thought about a scenario in which he came in at precisely 7:02 am, and when the expected question came, he would instead order a café-au-lait. But Evan was a bit frightened about how the café-au-lait might taste, or how he might react to it, thus the scenario was never realized. Evan was not a coward, nor did he regard himself as one. To be sure, he didn’t regard himself as anything at all. Just human, for that is what he was. As far as he knew, or cared to know, to be human was to wake and to sleep, to think and to feel, to be gifted with five useful senses that you could take for granted. To be human meant feeling love and hate, neither of which, Evan decided one day, he had ever felt. Above all, being human meant being imperfect.It was by the realization of this last point that Evan had, once, concluded that he was, in fact, human. Evan had never felt the strong emotion of hatred, nor love. Perhaps, if he had, he might have recognized it before it was too late, but, as previously stated, to be human is to be imperfect. And so Evan’s story begins.

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